"A close reading of Obama's speech ... to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce allows you to conclude pretty much whatever you are inclined to conclude about his actual view. And that tells you a great deal about the current phase of his presidency."
E.J. Dionne
Washington Post
E.J. Dionne has an interesting analysis of the president's recent remarks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
And, essentially, his conclusion is that the Barack Obama of 2011 really wants to be the Barack Obama of 2008.
He wants to be, as I have written here before, all things to all people — or, as Dionne puts it, "an effective Democrat to Democrats and a post–partisan to post–partisans."
Actually, that all–things–to–all–people shtick is hardly new. Presidents and would–be presidents have been trying to pull that one off for a long time, with varying degrees of success.
But that is an easier case to make when one is out of power than when one is in. Obama the Outsider could pull it off because he had no record to speak of.
Obama the Incumbent has a record. Obama the Incumbent has had to make choices. He has often made them timidly because, when you get right down to it, he does not really want anyone to be hurt by a decision he must make, but therein lies the problem. It is the nature of government to make choices that favor the interests of the many over the interests of a few.
Folks tended to recoil at Timothy McVeigh's use of the phrase "collateral damage" because they knew that, in his case, "collateral damage" meant all the innocent victims, especially the children, of his bomb in Oklahoma City.
And that, truly, is a vile image.
But, whatever one may say or think about McVeigh, it cannot be disputed that he understood the laws of nature. For someone to gain, someone else must lose.
It doesn't seem fair, but that is the way it is with everything — including public policy.
Obama often tries to cushion the blows from his policies. He talks a good game but pulls back if it appears someone will be hurt. It's an empathetic quality in him that some voters clearly find endearing — and it often is, I suppose, when it is found in a senator or a congressman.
But a president cannot be that thin–skinned. The buck must stop on his desk.
After more than two years in the White House, I would have thought that Obama would understand better by now that a president can't be a community organizer. There are down sides to decisions, and presidents must accept that.
Every decision a president makes is going to hurt someone, and calling for sacrifices is rarely a popular thing to do because people don't want to give up things. But most voters recognize that Obama walked into some quicksand when he took office, and it's going to take awhile to get out of it.
They just want to believe that things are moving in the right direction, and that has been a hard sell with all of the economy's fits and starts.
Obama may not want to mention the specifics, but his foes certainly will, which is sure to put Obama on the defensive.
That isn't good for a president who wants a second term.
This is the time in a president's first term when his focus should start to turn to his intentions in the next election. He is past the midterms now and must view his every move, every statement in political terms.
His opponents, of course, have been doing that all along. If Obama thought he was under a microscope for the last two years, well, he ain't seen nothing yet. Now, his every move, every utterance will be dissected endlessly by opportunistic Republicans who seem to be lining up for a shot at him like the armed passengers waiting their turns to beat the hysterical woman on "Airplane!"
As I'm sure you've heard, Obama's approval ratings have been on the upswing of late. Earlier this month, FOX News reported Obama's approval rating exceeded 50%. That's a few points higher than he got from Gallup a few days later.
Based on that, many Democrats claim that Obama, whose prospects for 2012 seemed doubtful at best following the hammering he took in the midterms, is on the rebound and is all but sure now to win a second term.
But this renaissance that Obama allegedly is enjoying may well turn out to be temporary, fueled by the contradictory economic report that said unemployment fell last month even though the economy generated far fewer jobs than are needed just to keep pace with the increase in the working–age population.
Obama is in the third year of his four–year term. That is a critical time for a first–term president. Where have other first–term presidents stood at this stage, and what did it mean?
- George W. Bush was reviled at the end of his presidency, but, in February 2003, just before launching the invasion of Iraq, Gallup reported that his approval rating stood at 58%.
- Bill Clinton, who is frequently cited as a Democratic role model for bouncing back from losing both chambers of Congress in 1994 to winning re–election in 1996, had an approval rating in Gallup/CNN/USA Today that was almost identical to Obama's — 47% — in February 1995.
- George H.W. Bush, who was defeated for re–election by Clinton, was riding a wave of Gulf War popularity in February 1991. Gallup reported his approval rating at that time was 80%, but it went into a steady decline shortly thereafter.
- In February 1983, Ronald Reagan, the icon of American conservatives, was beginning to emerge from what turned out to be the lowest approval ratings of his presidency.
For a brief time after the midterms, his popularity dropped below 40%, but, that February, Gallup said 40% of respondents approved of the job he was doing.
And his presidential popularity never dropped below 40% again, even when the Iran–Contra affair dominated the news. - In September 1978, Jimmy Carter brokered the Middle East peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, and that may well have lifted his party to a stronger performance in the midterms than might otherwise have been the case.
Anyway, by February 1979, the bloom was off the bush. Islamic extremists sparked a revolution in Iran that would lead to the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran later that year, and Carter, who had enjoyed approval ratings in the 60s and 70s in the early days of his presidency, slipped below 40% for the first — but not the last — time in Gallup's survey.
If they did, Reagan and Clinton almost certainly would have been one–term presidents — and George H.W. Bush almost as surely would have swept to a second term, perhaps becoming the first to carry all 50 states.
There is, though, a certain predictive quality to presidential approval ratings — even if it seems to take on the aura of a self–fulfilling prophecy sometimes.
Based on his approval rating at this point, for example, Carter wouldn't have been expected to be re–elected — and he wasn't.
And the younger Bush would have been expected to win a second term — which he did, but not by the landslide proportions that the approval ratings of February 2003 would have anticipated.
The only conclusion one can draw from approval ratings at this point in a presidency is that there is still much work for the president to do. His fate is still in his hands. What he chooses to do this year will have a lot to do with what happens next year.
The business of America, Calvin Coolidge famously said, is business.
And that, it seems to me, is the unmet challenge of the Obama presidency. Unemployment numbers are misleading. There is no real sense that the economy is improving. Gas has been flirting with $3/gallon again. Food prices are on the rise.
The business of America in the early 21st century is putting Americans back to work — and I've been reading a fascinating column by David Brooks of the New York Times that speaks of values.
Brooks has been reading a book that says that "until sometime around 1974, the American economy was able to experience awesome growth by harvesting low–hanging fruit ... [b]ut that low–hanging fruit is exhausted," in large part because "many of this era's technological breakthroughs produce enormous happiness gains, but surprisingly little additional economic activity."
We're not creating wealth.
The president's business in 2011 is to do everything in his power to encourage job creation.
If he is successful in 2011, I expect he will be successful in 2012.
If he is not successful in 2011, I have serious doubts about 2012.
As much as Obama's followers would like to make Republicans the scapegoats for whatever happens (or doesn't happen) this year, the choice is really up to him.
He is the president.
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